Archives
2003: Vol.
2, Numbers 1-12Read
past articles including:Series
on Leadership continued
Avoiding Dictatorship in a Free SocietyArt
and Politics Living
the Good LifeTeaching
Teens World
Peace in Less Than a Month?

Asleep while storms build,
in peaceful slumber
we dance in fantasies,
senses dulled;
nightmares lurk
in the clouds of our pleasures,
of our comforts and beliefs,
of our habits and routines,
thunderheads, gray and billowing
suppress cries and screams
until lightning strikes the earth —
a deluge of reality spills over
into life,
a dream created
by careless desires and denial;
crises finally breach
the dam of our complacency.

We awaken angry and in shock
our dreams so rudely interrupted,
long neglected debts
exhaled like bad morning breath
of indignation and fear;
shaken in naïveté and disbelief
unsteady, as the ground beneath
shifts, we stumble in despair,
in an unfamiliar room
with blank walls
and no door,
in a garden choked by weeds
sown by our own hand,
grief of imagination shattered —
our protective shelter now exposed
to the elements
and to the pains of others.

AwakeningRichard V. Sidy, January 3, 2009

Many people breathed a sigh of relief
as 2008 ended. From the financial mess, to environmental
crises, to international conflicts, so many felt that
last year was the worst in memory and they could not
wait for 2009 to begin. From a different perspective
however, 2008 was a great year! The ground has been
plowed for the seeds of change to finally germinate.
What people hated about 2008 was the exposure of all
the ignorance that has ruled our land and the world
for too long. Our great discomfort and the tragedies
of human suffering revealed our failures and shattered
our confidence and pride. We wake up at the dawn of
2009 realizing that we had no leadership in government
and economics and our life has been largely driven
by those satisfying their selfish interests.

It is hard to face our failures, but
fear, greed and fanaticism, the driving forces of past
and present suffering, die hard. As the new year was
born, Israel and Hamas reminded us that people are
still trapped in the illusion that the laws of the
jungle will somehow resolve grievances and make their
life more secure. On the contrary, all wars, conflicts
and uprisings neglect our shared humanness and perpetuate
the age-old sickness of hate.

Making friends
is more heroic
than defeating enemies.
There is no successful war
in the new millennium,
because war itself
is a sign of past failures,
the past failures
to create true friends.

So many human beings are sick
and tired (finally!) of the status quo that somehow
a new year will give us the excuse to change. One
would hope that the end of the world as we knew it
would create a definitive point of rebirth in social,
political, and economic culture — a dramatic
tipping point favoring the new thinkers, new innovators,
new activists, and new humanitarians. The year 2008
was so painful because the forces of evolution stimulated
the friction between the necessary adaptive qualities
for future well-being and the fossilized, decaying,
and irrelevant people, doctrines, and methodologies
of the past. So those still nostalgic for the past
are unhappy.

The past will not go away, but as humanity awakens
to new ideas and cooperates to make life better for
everyone, we can put it where it belongs: to history.
There were good initiatives that will continue to grow
to fruition in the future, and there were failures
that should teach us their lessons, but the future
belongs to those willing to move on. New and old co-exist
during such a period of major transition such as we
are currently experiencing. The old has to relinquish
its dominance and graciously let the new be expressed.
If not done willingly, the old order will continue
to cause pain to those attached to it. That interface
between the hope of new possibilities and the pain
of losing the old order is the essence of what we experienced
in 2008.

The new year has
enormous potential for being a turning point, an
awakening. What made 2008 different was that it produced
the crises that have been building for ages. Finally
we discovered that the Emperor was naked! The “Emperor” was
all the illusions and vanity by which humanity has
been governed for so long. Thank goodness for 2008
and welcome to 2009!